Evan Holm Plays Records On A Turntable Submerged Underwater

California based artist Evan Holm, creates Submerged Turntables, a kinetic installation featuring salvaged objects, turntables, records, and dark, murky water. The piece, which Holm used to perform at San Francisco’s Museum of Modern Art but now resides in his studio in Oakland, is meant to serve as a reminder that “all tracings of human culture will dissolve back into the soil under the slow crush of the unfolding universe.” By playing the records in the piece’s pitch-black pool, Holm is “enacting a small moment of remorse towards this loss.”

For this work, Evan submerged a working turntable in a dark liquid; he then proceeds to pick a record from his wall, which then is inserted onto the wet record player. The functioning underwater turntable is a mystery, and I think that that’s the most enticing part of the work; the turntable’s ability (against all odds) to play music under water, it is quite remarkable.

The work, heavy on symbolism, relies on our negative notions of pairings involving electricity and water (a parallel to doomed feelings). How can we ever think that an electric turntable could effectively work under water? It is this notion that brings Holm’s concept to a clearer view. By making this possible, he brings forth an “optimistic sculpture, for that just after the moment of submergence..the tone, the melody is pulled back out of the pool, past the veil of the subconscious, out from under the crush of time, and back into a living and breathing realm.” (via IGNANT)